Mathematics in ancient Egypt

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 505.

I. Before you read study the vocabulary that might help you to better understand the passage:

civilservice - государственная служба

recordkeeping - учёт, регистрация; ведение учёта

taxaccounting - учет налогов

publicworks - общественные работы; трудовая повинность

prosecution of war - ведениевойны

military supplies - военныепоставки

II. Read the passage and answer the questions:

1. What was the role of scribes in ancient Egypt? How did they affect mathematics?

2. Where do we know about Egyptian mathematics from?

3. What do we learn about mathematics from these documents?

The introduction of writing in Egypt in the predynastic period (c. 3000 BC) brought with it the formation of a special class of literate professionals, the scribes. By virtue of their writing skills, the scribes took on all the duties of a civil service: record keeping, tax accounting, the management of public works (building projects and the like), even the prosecution of war through overseeing military supplies and payrolls. Young men enrolled in scribal schools to learn the essentials of the trade, which included not only reading and writing but also the basics of mathematics.

What is known of Egyptian mathematics comes primarily from two long papyrus documents that once served as textbooks within scribal schools. The Rhind Papyrus (in the British Museum) is a copy made in the 17th century BC of a text two centuries older still. In it is found a long table of fractional parts to help with division, followed by the solutions of 84 specific problems in arithmetic and geometry. The Golenishchev Papyrus (in the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts), dating from the 19th century BC, presents 25 problems of a similar type. These problems reflect well the functions the scribes would perform, for they deal with how to distribute beer and bread as wages, for example, or how to measure the areas of fields or the volumes of pyramids and other solids.